Neal Stephenson is second only to William Gibson on the cyberpunk scene.
His books, like Snow Crash and Diamond Age, have helped to
construct the imaginative parameters of the genre of computer dominated,
virtual reality science fiction. But this book is not another technohipster
novel, instead it is an extended, somewhat digressive, essay on computer
operating systems--their history, purpose and possible future. Written
at a level that a layman can follow, but obviously geared towards a more
technical audience, he essentially argues that the current popular metaphors
through which we use computers--the desktop, the icon, the browser, etc.--place
unacceptable limits on user power and create an unacceptable level of conformity.
He favors command line driven operating systems, the various permutations
of UNIX like Linux, BeOS, etc. Much of what he says I disagree with,
but it is all pretty interesting.

As a threshold issue, the understanding that the most popular operating
systems are metaphorical is central to any discussion of the issue he raises.
When he says "in the beginning...was the command line", Stephenson is talking
about the fact that all early computers and most of those used today by
the computer literate, operate by typing specific codes into a command
line. But the great majority of us casual users give commands by
clicking on icons and using pull down menus. We don't really have
a feel for the underlying code that say makes Word open a document when
we click on a tiny button with a sheet of paper on it. Stephenson
argues that we would be more empowered if we did comprehend these basic
codes. This is undoubtedly true. We'd also be better off if
we understood our car engines and didn't have to listen to crooked mechanics
or had assimilated jurisprudence and didn't have to hire shyster lawyers
or understood medicine and didn't have to go see quack doctors, but are
any of these pursuits really effective uses of our time and energy and
are they necessary? I may not really believe my car needed $400 worth
of work, but if it's fixed and gets me to work, I'm relatively happy.
Similarly, there may be things I wish my Mac would do, even things that
I know must be reasonably easy to program it to do, but as long as I can
use it as a word processor and access the Web, I'm willing to settle for
less than perfect.

I actually found a couple of the sidelights more compelling than this
central argument. First, Stephenson casts a pleasingly jaundiced
glance at both MicroSoft and Apple and presents a full and fascinating
discussion of their strengths and weaknesses. Second, there is a
brief section where he presents a concise and cogent defense of Western
culture, which while it seemed kind of out of place, was nonetheless welcome:

Why are we rejecting explicit word-based
interfaces, and embracing graphical or
sensorial ones--a trend that accounts
for the success of both Microsoft and Disney?

Part of it is simply that the world is
very complicated now--much more complicated
than the hunter-gatherer world that
our brains evolved to cope with--and we simply
can't handle all of the details. We
have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust
some nameless artist at Disney or programmer
at Apple or Microsoft to make a few
choices for us, close off some options,
and give us a conveniently packaged
executive summary.

But more importantly, it comes out of
the fact that, during this century,
intellectualism failed, and everyone
knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the
common people agreed to loosen their
grip on traditional folkways, mores, and
religion, and let the intellectuals
run with the ball, and they screwed everything up
and turned the century into an abattoir.
Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely
tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous
as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn't
get creamed at some point during all of
this. We are free and prosperous because
we have inherited political and values
systems fabricated by a particular set
of eighteenth-century intellectuals who
happened to get it right. But we have
lost touch with those intellectuals, and with
anything like intellectualism, even
to the point of not reading books any more,
though we are literate. We seem much
more comfortable with propagating those
values to future generations nonverbally,
through a process of being steeped in
media. Apparently this actually works
to some degree, for police in many lands are
now complaining that local arrestees
are insisting on having their Miranda rights read
to them, just like perps in American
TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that
they are in a different country, where
those rights do not exist, they become
outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns,
dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in
the long run, to be a greater force
for human rights than the Declaration of
Independence.

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture
that propagates its core values through media
steepage seems like a bad idea. There
is an obvious risk of running astray here.
Words are the only immutable medium
we have, which is why they are the vehicle of
choice for extremely important concepts
like the Ten Commandments, the Koran,
and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages
conveyed by our media are somehow
pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts,
they can wander all over the place and
possibly dump loads of crap into people's
minds.

Orlando used to have a military installation
called McCoy Air Force Base, with long
runways from which B-52s could take
off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere
else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy
has been scrapped and repurposed. It has
been absorbed into Orlando's civilian
airport. The long runways are being used to
land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil,
Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come
to Disney World and steep in our media
for a while.

To traditional cultures, especially word-based
ones such as Islam, this is infinitely
more threatening than the B-52s ever
were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the
United States, that our arch-buzzwords,
multiculturalism and diversity, are false
fronts that are being used (in many
cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to
eradicate cultural differences. The
basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring
diversity" or whatever you want to call
it) is that people need to stop judging each
other-to stop asserting (and, eventually,
to stop believing) that this is right and
that is wrong, this true and that false,
one thing ugly and another thing
beautiful, that God exists and has this
or that set of qualities.

The lesson most people are taking home
from the Twentieth Century is that, in order
for a large number of different cultures
to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in
a neighborhood) it is necessary for
people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I
would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility
towards, all authority figures in modern
culture. As David Foster Wallace has
explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is
the fundamental message of television;
it is the message that people take home,
anyway, after they have steeped in our
media long enough. It's not expressed in
these highfalutin terms, of course.
It comes through as the presumption that all
authority figures--teachers, generals,
cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical
buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness
is the only way to be.

The problem is that once you have done
away with the ability to make judgments as
to right and wrong, true and false,
etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains
is clog dancing and macrame. The ability
to make judgments, to believe things, is
the entire it point of having a culture.
I think this is why guys with machine guns
sometimes pop up in places like Luxor,
and begin pumping bullets into Westerners.
They perfectly understand the lesson
of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons
come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps
with the bills turned sideways, the dads go
out of their minds.

The global anti-culture that has been
conveyed into every cranny of the world by
television is a culture unto itself,
and by the standards of great and ancient cultures
like Islam and France, it seems grossly
inferior, at least at first. The only good thing
you can say about it is that it makes
world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that
is actually a pretty good thing!

The only real problem is that anyone
who has no culture, other than this global
monoculture, is completely screwed.
Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees
any religion or philosophy, is raised
in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns
about civics from watching bimbo eruptions
on network TV news, and attends a
university where postmodernists vie
to outdo each other in demolishing traditional
notions of truth and quality, is going
to come out into the world as one pretty
feckless human being. And--again--perhaps
the goal of all this is to make us feckless
so we won't nuke each other.

On the other hand, if you are raised
within some specific culture, you end up with a
basic set of tools that you can use
to think about and understand the world. You
might use those tools to reject the
culture you were raised in, but at least you've got
some tools.

That is simply good stuff there--it calls to mind The
Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, which is high praise indeed.

The whole thing is short enough that you can probably read one of the
online
versions and it is interesting enough that I would recommend that you
give it a try.

Websites:

See also:

Neal Stephenson Links:Books & Culture's Book of the Week: Back to the Future: A sprawling new novel by the author of Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon goes to the 17th century to investigate the birth of the modern world. (You won't be surprised to learn that the Puritans are among the Bad Guys.) (Albert Louis Zambone, 10/13/2003, Christianity Today)